COSTCO’S MISSION statement includes
this important goal: “Take care of members.”
One of the ways Costco does that is by ensuring the food it sells is safe to eat. With food
safety in the news so much these days, I am
curious how a company that sells more than
60 million rotisserie chickens and 76 million
hot dog and soda combos each year continuously lives up to that promise.

The person who can help answer that
question is Craig Wilson, Costco’s vice president of food safety and quality assurance.
Costco takes hundreds of steps at various levels to safeguard the food it sells, Wilson tells
me. But if I want to see food safety in action,
he recommends that I spend time with
employees in the warehouses’ fresh foods
departments: the bakery, Service Deli, meat
department and Food Court.

At one of the company’s busiest ware-houses, across the street from Costco’s corpo-rate offices in Issaquah, Washington, I meetMichael Walker, the building’s assistant man-ager, who offers to show me some of the manyways of keeping Costco’s fresh foods safe.

It starts with food safety training

It all starts with food safety training thatCostco has developed for all warehouseemployees, Walker explains. Every warehouseemployee must take a Food Safety 1 courseevery year. “That’s about cleaning your hands,proper sanitation, proper attire and so on,”Walker says. “It ensures that employees arehandling food correctly through a register,that we’re not putting hot items with colditems, that we’re not cross-contaminatingmeat with other items.”Every three years, all staff-level managersand those in higher-level positions must alsotake an advanced Food Safety 2 course—evenif they don’t oversee a food area. It includesinstruction on safe temperatures for cold andhot food, food storage, code dates, sanitizertesting, etc.

Along with training, there are guidelinesthat cover operations throughout the ware-house. For example, one key step is keepingfoods at the right temperature. Every twohours, an employee does a temperature checkof all of the fresh foods departments—therefrigerated cases as well as the productsthemselves. “We don’t want to have any risingtemperatures that could possibly damage theproduct,” Walker explains.

Checks and balances

In the bakery, Molly Kite, the bakery
manager shows me a food safety log, called
the sanitation standard operating procedures
(SSOP) checklist. Each area where food is
prepared has its own SSOP manual, which
describes in exact details how to clean and
sanitize the area, from the ceiling fans to the
floor drains and every surface in between.

Costco developed its SSOPs based on
protocols for complex food processing operations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and rules for food service establishments
from the Food and Drug Administration and
local public health departments. It then
incorporated all of them into easy-to-follow,
step-by-step procedures for its employees.